


Fragments towards an Ascent, curated

by emrisemrisemris



Category: Cultist Simulator (Video Game)
Genre: Ascension: Enlightenment, Here be spoilers, Lantern, M/M, the Door-in-the-Eye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 22:11:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15228999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emrisemrisemris/pseuds/emrisemrisemris
Summary: Another gathering. I spoke of the Watchman's Secret, and he came to listen, leaning on the back of my chair: Slee, the astronomer. I had not thought of him in years.





	Fragments towards an Ascent, curated

Another gathering. I spoke of the Watchman's Secret, and he came to listen, leaning on the back of my chair: Slee, the astronomer. I had not thought of him in years. We knew one another in the Capital: I another bleary medical student among the horde, he already the darling of the School of Sciences. He walks with a cane now. It cannot be good for him, this city of hills and stairs.

I had not intended to dream of the Wood tonight. I studied nothing more inspiring before bed than the newspaper, and purposed only a mundane and thorough rest. But my sleep was riven with half-memories of Slee… A wall became a tree under my hands, the familiar shattering. The red need was still on me when I woke. Let it pass soon.

A fine day. I give the nurses permission to take some of the patients - those who can stand it - out into the Institute's quadrangle, to take the air. They gawp like goldfish at the sun.

An evening with my dictionaries of Sanskrit and my latest trophy from Morland's. They have had a great quantity of Tantric texts recently, bought at auction from the estate of a Shire baronet of abstruse tastes and abominable carelessness. The book is stained, cracked, here and there bloodied. I have made little progress.

Another gathering. Slee came. I do not know who invited him - Mme Bechet, perhaps? I spoke - I fear I spoke immoderately - but the Lantern demands truth and the Grail denies moderation. He lingered in the hallway, afterwards, as the others hurried out into the drizzle with their heads bowed; his eyes still have the old animation in them. I do not think he remembers me.

I have passed the White Door. The journey was arduous; I am drained, as though I had done a hard day's work. And again - stronger now - again I have woken to a scarlet hunger in the air.

Today I was seized with the urge to paint - a persistent irritation of the imagination that would not pass. The paints dry on the canvas even now. It has, I think, some little quality. I shall ask Valliser at the Circlet Gallery if he thinks it worth anything.

Slee lectures at the University on Wednesday the fourteenth, a public lecture, on the work of the medieval astronomer Eleazar of Worms. I had intended to study. I should not go. I am too close to deciphering the Mantra: I cannot spare the time.

An officer of the Bureau visited the hospital today. A routine visit, she said: the inmates of such institutions as my own are weak-willed creatures (she said) and easy prey for unnatural forces (she said) - except for those who are not, who are more dangerous. The Registrar showed her around my ward, and my poor confused charges. She paused - just for a moment she paused - in the doorway, as if she had smelt gas; but she did not look at me.

Ysabet and Porter and the hulking fellow she hired, whose name I cannot recall, returned today from St Agnes'. I was right. Some abandoned office had not been wholly emptied of its books. It has been now.

Valliser took the painting. He tells me I am accidentally fashionable - that the connoisseurs of this season's art are much in search of work that captures the ethereal, the ineffable - the forbidden. He is sure he can find a buyer, and he has no more love for the Bureau than do I. Hardly surprising.

I cannot sleep. The Wood drags at me when I nod. The summer suffocates me when I lie awake. And so I write notes to myself in the grey light before the dawn, when the colour is leached out of the world and a thousand faceless fears cluster round the bed. I know my purpose, and yet. And yet.

Saliba reminded me it is Wednesday, and after that I could not settle to my work. I told him so, with some edge, and I suppose now I owe the man an apology. I did go to Slee's lecture. He explained with surprising humour that his doctor will not permit him to stand at the lectern, and gave the lecture without notes from a chair, with a student at the blackboard as amanuensis. I confess I followed little enough of the talk and saw none of the formulae whatsoever, being too focused upon the man. He has grown into his face: his hair is greying, and I doubt his cheekbones provoke the fainting-fits they used to, but there is more character in his smile now, more depth to his eyes. We spoke afterwards. He  _ does  _ remember me, and prevailed on me to meet him next week to, what did he say, reminisce. I fear I blushed. But the appointment is fixed.

I am sick, curse it. Something has settled on my lungs. I have been to work anyway, and worn a mask to keep from adding to my patients' miseries, for all the good it will do. 

I called into Morland's on my lunch-hour - for once, today, I had one; the ward was quiet - and have secured another volume of interest.  _ The Thirteenth Idyll  _ is the title, the author left unnamed, though it is little of a disguise for a writer of such distinctive style, who even in his authorised works slipped perilous truths. I should show it to Slee; he always was a poet.

There is a Bureaucrat sniffing after me, or one of their informers. Dorothy is quite certain. I have not asked her how she knows. 

It is a vile day, all clinging humidity and louring skies, but I have not had so light a heart for weeks. Dear Slee, dear bright unconquered Slee! We spoke for hours. Tennyson - the  _ Book of the Perfumer  _ \- Newton's madness - the late eclipse - the calculations of the transit of Venus - even mutually lamented the crudities of the Bureau. (I had not thought they would pursue astronomers, but they do; Slee tells me they are the reason the eminent Camille Flammarion has published nothing for thirteen years.) It was Slee, not I, who raised the delicate - ha - topic of our previous acquaintance. He begged the pleasure of a continuation. It was all I could do to contain myself; his office has thin walls. 

How slowly this week passes! The roads are molten lead, and the sunlight lies on every slate and tree-branch like the gold vile Cortés returned to Motecuhzoma. 

One day remains. I shall dream of the Wood tonight - and then tomorrow he shall come to meet the others, and see the foundations of the edifice we are raising to the Glory. After dusk I shall make him mine; and before dawn I shall make him ours.

Connie Lee. It is Connie Lee, the heiress. Could she not spend her inheritance on suffrage, or philanthropy or the funding of archaeological expeditions? Endow a museum, a University chair, a hospital wing, an institute for those who grasped at greater mysteries and had them shatter in their hands! Better any of those than this, this willing subjugation of vitality and intellect to a Bureau that condemns the one and fetters the other.

I have passed the Stag Door, with the Mantra Unmerciful upon my lips. I woke with the histories of forgotten reaches singing in my skull - reached to write this note - and woke Slee. Still it does not seem real, each midnight waking, to break the surface of the sea of dreams and find him waiting.

Slee returned triumphant from Morland's this evening - a detour on his way home from lectures; I forbore from mentioning that his way did not appear to have taken him  _ home _ \- brandishing an unexpurgated Catullus and, prize of prizes, a shabby German-printed edition of the  _ Excidenda  _ to Ovid's  _ Metamorphoses.  _

Et positae spatiis aequalibus Horae.

I have spoken the words of the Mantra to Slee - yoked its power to his own - and he is more, now. His eyes shine even in the day. He woke me in the dull hour before the dawn, from petty dreams, to point out stars, and to compare the Milky Way to the silver sweep of a scar upon the sky.

The days of the Sun are passed; the earth turns towards autumn and the days of the Moth, of the martyrdom of the Wood and the shedding of unnecessary and outgrown things. 

You would not think Slee had a home to go to. When he is not at the University, he inhabits our library, plucking books from their shelves like a poltergeist, or my rooms. I have told him to be careful; I have told him I have enemies; I have told him Miss Lee has lackeys and stranger servants. He asked if I wished him not to call. I could not say yes. He shines in my dingy study brighter than the sun, kinder than the Lantern that sits so plainly on his soul.

Tinea, excubitor, linum atrum, chrysocolla; cor immitissimus, mater formicarum, saga germanaque, tribunus cicatricum; dux auri, columba eburnea, cornix littoris, lunata. (Safer not to cross the gate of noon, even in mere enumeration.) There is a weight and power in the names I hear in dreams - but there is a music and a laughter in those Ovid gives that smells of warm earth and the shadow of the Ranges. Today my heart is lifted.

Miss Lee persists, to her credit, though Sylvia has seen to it that she has nothing more than whispers and slander to present to her masters at the Bureau. Valliser tells me she attends a show at the gallery next month; I, of course, as a friend, require no invitation. I should not go.

Slee has discovered that I paint and insists he must have a portrait. Very well, then, though I have warned him that the - inspiration - in my work is seldom flattering. I believe he thought I merely self-deprecated, but I spoke honestly. I cannot capture the glory of those eyes, the endurance written in those limbs.

Another sickness. Today at least I can write. Slee brings me books and reads them: I cannot hold a weighty volume for more than a few minutes. It is not unpleasant - he is at least as fluent in Latin and Greek as I, and his Sanskrit improves rapidly - and his voice, his voice. He lingered over the ritual fragments in the book of the  _ Unburnt God  _ with an appreciation that brought to my cheeks the first colour they have seen in days.

Sketches towards a portrait of Slee. Must redo hands. I think I have caught the edge of his smile, though.

He has his portrait. Apparently he intends to hang it in his office. I … am less than satisfied. For a while I thought I had a strand of something brighter; but it is gone.

There waits in the cellar of the temple now a thing the grimoires call a Hint, a thing of mirrors and edges. It has taken residence there with all appearance of docility. It is willing to travel with the expedition to the Citadel. I think. I am not sure, still, I do not dream.

It is still there.

Neville has gone, and Auclair is packing to follow him. The ceremony tonight lacked their voices. The Hint went too.

The Spider Door - for the first time I have caught sight of it. Agony. It requires blood, I did not know, and in the absence of an offering it grasped at the heartbeat of the dreamer who came so unequipped. I do not think I will sleep again tonight.

Slee is talking of retiring from the University. In public, for his health; his joints continue to decay, the same vile deterioration that has plagued him since his youth. In private, he confides, he can no longer speak of the stars as mere chemical fires, not when he has listened at midnight to the weeping of the sky.

Valliser is gone. The Circlet Gallery is locked, boarded, without word of another owner. I am certain Miss Lee's hand is in this - Miss Lee, and her lackeys of the Bureau. He had a painting of mine. Only one. Dozens on display, hundreds in storage; only one was mine. Surely there are riper heresies than mine among them on which she can sate her thirst.

Slee judged me overly distracted, and insisted upon distracting me further, presenting me with the formula that proves a circle must be formed from an infinitely declining line. 

The second Hour is the Watchman, who is the Door in the Eye; who is like a man, and like a thing, and like a threshold; who is the holder of the light and the aperture that admits it and the light itself; who guards, and who enters, and who is entered.

I had tasked Saliba with finding me some poor wretch to throw to the Spider Door. Tonight he found one. I shall sleep tonight in the cellar of the temple, in front of the chained door, with the cupboard-key beneath my left hand and Biedde's dagger beneath my right. 

Blood under my fingernails, and a little in my hair. Nowhere else. 

Study goes nowhere. I lack the fire, the insight; against this obdurate mystery mere learning beats in vain. I have therefore abandoned my notes to their own devices and proposed to Slee that we visit the Ecdysis Club; in all his time in the city, he has never been, and I have not visited in months. 

The days at the Institute pass. One blurs into the next. Without the changes of the weather, I could not tell you how many had passed; and even now I can only say it has been four days since the snow fell. The flags of the hospital courtyards are slick and filthy. This is the season when the grip of the soul upon the world is tested. I shall have fewer patients soon.

I write this watching Slee asleep. Scarcely half an hour after the ceremony he complained of drowsiness, though first dark came early, and now he sleeps, stiller than the dead. His breath touches my palm if I hold my hand before his lips, but only faintly. The tokens of the transformation came upon him in the circle - but I suspect the truth of his understanding will reach its fullness in his dreams.

He still sleeps. It has been a day and more.

Still. I cannot concentrate upon my duties, I cannot concentrate upon my studies. My reason eats itself. I took myself this evening to speak with one of Saliba's prisoners, destined for the Spider Door, and now they tell me she is dead. I do not remember that. There is no blood.

Still. I did not sleep last night. It is as if all the sleep in the house has drained like rain in summer into Slee. I passed - hours - I do not know - staring at the candle-flame, until the purple image of my own nerves haunted the back of my vision. A dozen times I have thought I saw him stir, and then nothing.

Still. They have taken Leo, poor Leo, who was not even so far steeped in it as the rest of us. But he - I find myself at once relieved, incensed and terrified - can the Bureau, for all their terror, not lay hands upon a true initiate when led by the nose towards it by the indefatigable Miss Lee? (Apparently not.) But should I not be grateful that they seized on Leo, who had not passed the stage of dazzled worship, and knows nothing of the mystery? (Perhaps.) Was it incompetence, or luck, or is this a warning of things to come?

Slee is awake, and parched like a man who has passed the lone and level sands. He has said nothing to me but to quote Kipling and ask for water. His eyes - I cannot describe his eyes.

I have scribed the  _ concursatae  _ upon a scroll of glass in an ink that exists only at certain hours, and laid it under the pillow, and last night I saw it - the Peacock Door - the door that bleeds light across its pristine threshold - that in its bars holds a tint that is to Tyrian purple as water is to dust. 

He names himself a Seer, and can scarcely speak two words without finding some apt formula or pertaining line. The whole world dazzles him, like a penitent who walks into a cathedral and falls awed and weeping to his knees. 

The Hinter have returned from the Ranges. They have brought - though I do not know how they may have carried it - they have brought bounties. A grimoire in what I can only guess is Deep Mandaic. (There is a tablet with a little of it in a dingy case in the white Museum. I say a little: stray characters, disarticulated from their words, all that was left when the inscription was razed from the stone.) A Marruvine fetish, horrid thing. And a paint-pot, a little stone jar sealed with black wax, and under the seal - o glory - refulgin, a sorcerer's ransom of it, shining. This I could not have hoped for. This is what drips from the wounds of heaven; this is the blood of night. 

Another day passed in the clammy silence of the ward. One poor lunatic shied from my touch, as though I burned.

Slee was always passionate. He has become incandescent. He whispers me fragments of the Bard, of the Shire-poets, of Sappho paraphrased.

I cannot pass my easel now without stealing a glance into the sealed jar. The light aches in my bones. They say there is a small stone church on the Continent where some hayseed Leonardo sold their innocence for an ounce of it; where the haloes and wounds of the martyred saints shine with a light seen only in dreams. 

In the latest of the vaults they found a mirror. I recognised it as a Watchman's Glass, cracked ( _ from side to side,  _ said Slee, of course;  _ the curse has come upon me _ ) quite cleanly from edge to edge. The girl who brought it - oh, what was her name, I cannot remember, but she is sharp - said the Hinter were unhappy to come too close, or perhaps could not do so.

We went to the Ecdysis again tonight. It is a little secular ritual, now. There are others of esoteric inclinations in the audiences of its shows, and in the warren of private rooms above one may spend the passions aroused below without fear of prying eyes. Tonight dear Slee played both the altar and the offering; I write this in a nest of crimson sheets, as he lies exhausted in the curve of my other arm.

Laidlaw has repaired the Watchman's Glass. Tonight I shall set it on the altar, behind the unquenched flame, and meditate upon it until I pass into dreams, and towards the Glory.

It is morning. It is  _ morning.  _ It  _ is  _ morning.  _ It  _ is morning. 

I have passed the Peacock Door and prostrated myself before its shining wounds, and I remember nothing of what I saw, but the air that haunts me now on waking fills me with the incarnadescent longing of the Grail, the longing of sinews and narrow veins. Every fibre in my body yearns for Slee, without whom I feel discarnate, empty of the flesh. 

I have proposed to him the idea that came to me that night. I shall paint him again -  _ again!  _ as the lightning recapitulates the spark - and I do not care for the Bureau or their bloodhounds. Let them hang me high as Haman; let them pitch me from the Tarpeian down. I shall have this. I shall.

Sketches towards the Eye. Must redo the detail of the linkwork in better light.

Slee is away, a lecture in the Capital. His amanuensis will read for him: his colleagues think his illness has taken his voice at last, and mutter piously to themselves in corners of  _ inspiration _ . They do not realise he no longer troubles himself with mundane speech. Still, he is feted by his peers. Mine look down on me with pity, still toiling between the beds after so many years. 

Sketches towards the Eye. (This specimen came from the Hospital.)

Sketches towards the Eye. (From a photograph of the Cathedral of St Saviour.)

Slee indulges my whimsy. More: elaborates it. I have only to put him on his back and poetry pours from him like water, a clamour of every fragment that has ever caught in words a half-glimpse of the Glory. He is patient with my sketches, but only so patient.

After all this time, one gift begets another. Miss Lee is my guest, or the guest of the stone room in the cellar that Saliba so euphemistically calls the cupboard. The Second Thirstly brought her to Saliba, and Saliba brought her to me. 

The painting is done. My fingers are stained with light. My head aches. But it is done. I can never exhibit this.

I painted Slee in the semblance of the Door-in-the-Eye, and scraped my pot of refulgin dry. The canvas holds all of him, naked, compromised, bleeding, and unbowed. The light fills and overflows and is all through him, the Hour incarnate, who is the union of the Unwise Mortal and the Egg Unhatching and was animated by a fragment of the vivisected Sun. 

I have looked at my work again in the grey Moth-light before the sun rises. Tonight I shall take my remaining paints to the auction-house, and burn my easel. I do not need Slee's powers of augury to know that I will never paint again.

I have spoken to Miss Lee. Last night. My head is full of brightness, a glass curtain on the verge of being pushed aside. They tell me she is dead. 

Slee tells me I have manifested the Sixth Mark. He looks at me with what is not awe, nor terror, and yet I do not think it can be pity. 

Laidlaw has repaired the Watchman's Glass again. I do not know how. I do not  _ wish  _ to know how. I would swear the hollows under his eyes are a little deeper.

I woke this morning with the insight that eluded me. Within the hour I had it. It is before me even now.

There is a tale that reaches us from the twelfth century, in Latin from the Welsh, that by that time had become part of the myth of Arthur; but its bones are older. It describes how the queen of the Lost Land, sometimes named the White Ghost, was stolen from her consort by the lord of the Summer Country, which is an island with glass walls, reached by crossing a bridge of swords. 

Theresa sits in the parlour of my house with the tea-pot at her left elbow and a volume of Illopoly at her right. I have told her what I purpose. She showed no surprise. (For how many others has she officiated? - how many other lives seen offered up upon the terrible altar of the Glory?) She spoke plainly to me, of natures and necessities; but she was kind to Slee.

I rose early today, and with Slee beside me watched the sun climb up over the jagged horizon - painting the eaves and gables with golden light - spinning the last of the night's mist into flame, like the girl spinning straw into gold - climbing through the lapis sky with a kind of fierce and patient joy. For a moment, as the clock began to strike noon, I fancied I saw it rise past the meridian, as if to keep ascending; but it was only a trick of the eye, and it resumed its course.

There is a familiar line to the Baltomerian's jaw, a trick of light and shadow I have seen engraved. I can prove nothing. But I left a copy of the  _ Dream  _ on the table, as if by chance, and a smile did cross her lips when she picked it up, though the mirror did not reflect it.

I fell asleep last night in Slee's arms. We have not spoken of what comes, but he knows. He sees further than I; perhaps he has already seen how this ends. I dreamed of him, of taking him out of this mouldering city to somewhere where the sky is larger - of soft grass beneath and sturdy trunk behind - and found the Wood, and what a place of peace and innocence it seems. I have looked upon it and known it, and it holds no terror.

It is to be tonight. The Baltomerian will assist me: on no mortal disciple lies the aspect of the Lantern as heavily as on her. Slee is not here. He departed the city before I rose, alone, and quoted Kipling again to the Hinter who met him at the gate. 

I could follow him. 

I cannot follow him.

I have given to the Glory time, and pain, and sleep, and innocence. Now I must give it loyalty. I shall cross the bridge of swords alone and rise alone to the Incursus. I cannot look back. 

Perhaps some day he, too, will repeat in the Glory-circle the Mantra of Ascent, and a Mansus-creature with a little of my face will lead him through the bleeding door.

Fiat lux.

  
*  
  


_**Fragments towards an Ascent, curated** _

_ A cheap, unlabelled box file filled with loose sheets of yellowed notepaper. Atop a heap of querulous mundanities is a sketch of startling vividness, the smile almost moving on the page.  _


End file.
